"Perhaps I have been a little hurried, after all, in classing myself as
an absolute pauper," I explained as she read. "You see, I must go out
there and look into these things."
"Going away again?" She looked up at me, startled.
"For a couple of weeks. And when I come back, Miss Grace--"
So now I was up to the verge of that same old, definite question.
She sat up in the chair as though pulling herself together in some
sudden resolve, and looked me straight in the face.
"Jack," she said, "why should we wait?"
"To be sure," said I. "Only I do not want you to marry a pauper if any
act of my own can make him better than a pauper in the meantime."
"You temporize," she said, bitterly. "You are not glad. Yet you came to
me only last spring, and you--"
"I come to you now, Miss Grace," I said.
"Ah, what a difference between then and now!" she sighed.
For a time we could find nothing fit to say. At last I was forced to
bring up one thing I did not like to mention.
"Miss Grace," said I, seating myself beside her, "last night, or rather
this morning, after midnight, I found a man prowling around in the
yard."
She sprang up as though shocked, her face gray, her eyes full of terror.
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